Open Access Do's and Don'ts for KNAW researchers

The Academy supports the open-access policy of the European Union and the Dutch government. It believes that the results of publicly financed research should also be publicly accessible.

Publication cultures differ widely between the various disciplines, and the Academy does not pursue a uniform approach to open access.

What it does do, however, is follow the 'green route' to the maximum extent, with researchers uploading a version of their article to a repository, i.e. a digital storage area for publications and data. For the green route, the Academy applies an embargo for articles of up to six months, considering that to be a reasonable period.

Besides the green route, researchers can also follow the 'gold route', in which case they publish their results in open-access journals through publishers’ platforms.

Do

Make open access to your article a high priority. That will increase its traceability, use, number of citations, and impact.

If possible, make use of an open licence (such as Creative Commons CC-BY) so that users have as many rights as possible.

Check the open-access policy of the body that is funding the research. The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the European Commission, for example, expect publications resulting from the research that they fund to be open access.

If you want to submit an article for peer review, check whether the publisher’s policy complies with that of the funding body. You can do that via a database such as RoMEO, which provides data on several thousand journals and publishers.

By preference, publish your article in a high-quality open-access journal. Include any charges for this in your research budget. You can find a list of reliable open-access journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals. In the case of Springer and Wiley, contracts have been concluded that make it possible to publish articles free of charge in their (hybrid) journals. You can find more information about this on the Academy’s intranet (only accessible by Academy staff).

Immediately after your article has been accepted, upload a PDF – of at least the latest author’s version – to the Academy’s 'Pure' publication repository. Alternatively, insert a digital object identifier (DOI) into Pure or a link to the full text in another open-access repository. All publications in Pure are shown in NARCIS. That means that they can be found via Google and Google Scholar. Pure also complies with the requirements of national (NWO) and international (EU) research funding bodies (unlike commercial services such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, or Mendeley).

Don't

Don’t just blindly sign a publisher’s agreement.

Never sign an agreement whereby you yourself hold the copyright but the publisher retains the exclusive and permanent rights to exercise that copyright.

Don’t publish in closed-access journals because you assume there are not (yet) any open-access journals with a high impact indicator (such as the Journal Impact Factor) or that they are not subject to peer review.